Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Sparta and Falcon and Steg, the crippled chimpanzee, were all cousins under the skull.

  Sparta loaded the whole capacious secret file into her own memory and retracted her spines from the computer ports. She stood in the moonlit office, listening to the keening cries of exotic birds, the cough of a tiger, the chatter of sleepless monkeys in the menagerie.

  There were powers at loose in the world that intended to render humans as evolutionarily passé as monkeys and chimpanzees—intended to render the distinction meaningless. Holly Singh was working for them, not for the Council of Worlds, not for the Board of Space Control, and certainly not for the welfare of her patients.

  Sparta left Singh’s office and went down the hall. She removed the wire loop from the alarm circuit and closed the window, leaving the neat hole in the glass, then returned and left by the front door. Whether she confronted them now or in the morning hardly mattered. As an officer of the Board of Space Control, she would arrest Dr. Holly Singh. Singh and her servants were helpless to resist.

  Humans and machines had been in growing symbiosis for centuries. Sparta was but a slightly precocious form of what was to come, the inevitable melding of human individual and human-generated mechanism. What was she then but what was once called a cyborg?

  No, the dead eighteen-year-old in her cried, I am human. A human being corrupted by this artificial dependence, these prostheses that made up for no natural or necessary deficiency but were forcibly grafted onto and into her by others with inhuman programs of their own.

  Yet she had become dependent upon her prostheses, even while telling herself she used them only for the good, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of discovering what had become of her parents, supposedly murdered, and for the sake of finding those who might have murdered them, and for the sake of eliminating those evil beings who, in giving her these powers, had given her the power to fight back.

  And she loved the power.

  At this moment she was afraid of nothing.

  She walked boldly down the moonlit path, a confident woman who believed that her extraordinary senses protected her from anything the night might hold, and never heard the creature who came out of the shadows behind her.

  15

  He dropped out of the trees onto her back and for a horrible instant, as her nostrils flooded with the odor of the beast, she thought he would rip her head from her shoulders with his leathery black hands and black-haired muscular arms. Yellow fangs grazed her scalp.

  Her strength was a tenth of his and, under ordinary circumstances, her quickness—even enhanced as it was—was a bare match for a chimpanzee’s. Desperately she jerked and bent, evading his fangs, breaking his grip on her throat, and rolled, slipping out of the grasp of his clinging, uncoordinated legs. Poor Steg’s damaged central nervous system had not prevented him from displaying patience and stealth, but his motor control was severely impaired.

  Having failed to kill her immediately, he was at her mercy. He fled, and she sprinted after him. As the terrified chimpanzee ran and stumbled along the path, stretching his arms and vaulting on his knuckles, he hooted and shrieked in anguish, and his hoots and shrieks were immediately taken up by all the sleepless animals caged in Holly Singh’s private menagerie.

  Something had metamorphosed in Sparta. Her mercy had been strained in these last weeks and days, and she had no more compassion for this miserable half-ape than Artemis for a stag. The grace and speed that would have made a dancer of her had she chosen to be a dancer now bore her in an arc of vengeance.

  Ten meters down the path she sprang onto his back and brought him screaming to the ground. The loop of wire she had used to bypass the clinic’s alarm system went around his throat and cut off his panic-stricken calls.

  She used violent leverage. He died in seconds.

  Death. The sucking vortex that beckoned her, which she had resisted with less energy, less conviction, as the months wore on. A trail of death, until this moment none of it of her volition but leading her on, as if she were gravitationally attracted to a moving nexus of destruction. On Earth. Venus. The moon. Mars.

  And her parents—dead or not, they were gone. Laird, or Lequeu, or whatever the shadowy figure who dogged her path now called himself, had tried with all his power to murder them. That was enough, and although he was out of her reach, others were not. She anticipated Holly Singh’s return, for now she understood very well why Singh had snuck away.

  Steg—who understood commands a bit more complex than Singh had pretended—had been ordered to murder Sparta in her bed. He was on his way to do it when she encountered him on the path. To have been killed by him would have seemed a tragic and most regrettable accident. Surely Dr. Singh would have wept copious tears, and the deranged Steg would, sadly, have been put to death. But Singh deserved to die more than Steg.

  When Sparta raised herself from the corpse and stood erect there was a moonlight gleam in her eye more savage than any light she had seen in the chimpanzee’s. She, who thought she hated killing. She, who lived to prevent murder and to bring murderers to merciful justice. She stood with the blood of a crippled animal dripping from the wire in her hands and with the keening cries of other terrified animals filling the night. In their calls was something less than mourning but more than fear—the advertisement of death.

  Sparta found, as she searched her soul and reminded herself of what she had supposed she believed in, that not only could she dredge up no objection to killing Holly Singh, she could even look forward to that event with a certain savor.

  With this newfound taste for blood, however, there came a heightened sense of the refined pleasures of the hunt. She decided that, after all, she would defer immediate revenge on Dr. Singh in favor of bigger game.

  A long run along the ridge in the thin, cold air brought her to Darjeeling town. The rising sun came up from the mountains toward China, not like thunder but like cold fire; her breath steamed in front of her, and she thought as she watched it that the searing ball of yellow flame was challenging her directly, in the most intimate terms, to cease from patient questioning and to act—that the rising sun had transfigured her. To her right, the roof of this world. To her left, the inhabited universe and its deity, speaking to her in spears of light.

  A few purchases in the market and a visit to the latrine behind a sweet shop and she was ready to board the morning’s first train. Riding the chugging antique down through the tea terraces toward the plains, she was just another bedraggled tourist girl in search of enlightenment and bangh.

  By the time the little train reached its terminus, Sparta’s thinking had evolved. It seemed to her that her role as Ellen Troy, inspector for the Board of Space Control, had finally and completely outlived its usefulness. For what she was about to do, what was a badge but an encumbrance? She walked across the train platform to the nearest infobooth. All by itself—as she had so often proved in her short history—it was a ticket to wealth and mobility and invisibility. A smile tugged at her perpetually open lips. She rarely smiled, and this one was not pleasant.

  A day after leaving Darjeeling, she walked into the Varanasi shuttleport. Her eyes were liquid brown, her hair was as long and straight and black and sleek as Holly Singh’s own, and her sari would have graced a maharani. When she spoke to the cabin attendant on the hypersonic jitney to London, her accent was perfect BBC, enlivened by musical hints of India.

  But when she left Heathrow for London by magneplane three hours later, her hair was once more red-gold and curly and her eyes were sparkling green.

  The next morning she woke up stiff and cold, to the sound of black rain beating against her apartment’s single small window. Winter had come to London.

  The videoplate brightened to the image of a young man wrapping his rosebud lips around his words as if he were sucking a lozenge. “Ronald Weir of the BBC reporting. Here is the morning’s news. The Board of Space Control has just announced the seizure of the freighter Doradus. The vessel was discovered aband
oned in a sparsely populated region of the main asteroid belt. The Doradus and its crew have been sought for several months in connection with the attempted robbery of the artifact known as the Martian plaque. A Space Board spokesperson notes that the Doradus was discovered to have been heavily armed with sophisticated weapons of a type restricted to use by authorized agencies of the Council of Worlds. The registered owners of the vessel have been approached with new inquiries.” The announcer shuffled his papers. “In Uzbekistan, South Central Asia Administrative Region, religious leaders have announced a cease-fire in the nine-year-old hostilities…”

  Sparta put on one of Bridget Reilly’s plainest dresses and sweaters. After a quick breakfast of soy paste on bran, she wrapped her threadbare Burberry around her and made her way through the gray rain to her office in the city.

  Without a good morning to anyone, she hung up her coat and umbrella and sat down at her terminal.

  To date, no bureaucracy had been safe from her electronic inquiries. Like ivy on a stone wall, her mind had reached into the crevices of every bureaucratic facade, patiently prying loose a flake of information here and a flake there, until massive structures of obstinacy and deceit had crumbled.

  The Board of Space Control operated the most sophisticated computer nets in the inhabited worlds; an entire bureau within the Board was devoted to perfecting computer security, and another whole bureau was dedicated to ruining the work of the first. There was a way, only one, to maintain perfect security in a computer: complete isolation, not allowing the machine to talk to any other—and for the Space Board’s purposes, that sort of security was useless.

  Sparta—although she was not supposed to be—was thoroughly familiar with the intricacies of the Space Board’s primal and fractal encryption systems. When all else failed and she chose to take the time, the computer behind the bone of her forehead could break encrypted codewords by sheer number-crunching power. Thus, in the long run, she could peek into any file she wanted to see. Much more easily, she altered files and created new files as she needed them.

  Information was an ocean, one she swam in freely.

  16

  “The Prime Directive states that in any contact between humans and unknown forms of life, the human explorers shall take whatever steps are necessary to avoid disturbing the unknown forms. There follow quite a few footnotes and clarifications, of course, but that’s the gist of it.”

  “An excellent principle; one we lobbied for with great energy.” Dexter Plowman looked alarmingly like his sister, with gaunt face, bristling brows, and a tight cap of crimped, gray-black hair. “And successfully, of course.”

  Blake and the two Plowmans were trudging briskly northeastward along a seemingly endless, garbage-fouled beach. To their right, tired surf the color of tea slumped against the sand. To their left rose the twisted and blackened ruins of Atlantic City.

  Arista had tracked her brother to this bleak shore, where he was making a personal inspection—and incidentally providing the mediahounds with photogram opportunities—in preparation for his next big suit against the government. The mediahounds having been reluctant to leave the parking lot and fill their shoes with sand, Blake had Dexter and Arista alone long enough to make his pitch.

  “What I’m getting at, sir, is that the Prime Directive was promulgated at a time when there was no clue whatever of surviving life of any kind elsewhere in the solar system…”

  “Plenty of evidence for life!” One could almost hear the unspoken objection! in Dexter’s tone. “All those fossils!”

  “Yes, sir, at the time a half dozen scraps of fossil had been discovered on the surface of Venus—all confidently dated to a billion years ago, when Venus had oceans, a moderate climate, and an Earth-like atmosphere.”

  “The whole point, Redfield! Close the gate before the pigs get out, isn’t that what they say?”

  “The horse, Dexter,” his sister muttered.

  He ignored her. “And sure enough, it wasn’t long before the Martian plaque proved they had gotten here. And just a few months ago, there were those spectacular discoveries on Venus…”

  “Yes, sir, I was on Port Hesperus at the time,” Blake said.

  “Oh, really?”

  “My question is different. I’m wondering just what motivated…”

  “Motivation!” Dexter vigorously kicked at a cluster of used syringes. “A space station worker came to us with evidence that he had been infected with extraterrestrial microorganisms.”

  “What a fiasco!” Arista sneered. “You couldn’t produce a shred of evidence at the trial.”

  “While we may have lost the horseshoe, dear”—he wasn’t looking at her when he said “dear”—“we saved the nail.”

  “You lost the case,” she muttered.

  “We won the principle. No contact between humans and aliens. Quarantine established as the baseline. A resounding victory for exo-ecology. None of this going in and mucking about with things we don’t understand.” He paused long enough to scrape a gob of tar from his foot.

  “Yes sir. While the worker’s lawsuit didn’t succeed, the Space Board did not resist your subsequent initiative campaign to write the Prime Directive into administrative law,” Blake said.

  Dexter gave him an appreciative glance—what a bright lad! “In fact, their Long Range Planning office had already come over to our side. Given friendly testimony.”

  Blake hesitated, approaching the delicate moment. “The worker whose grievance you undertook…”

  “A class action, as a matter of fact. On behalf of all employees of the Board of Space Control who had been exposed to disease-causing extraterrestrial organisms.”

  “Nonexistent extraterrestrial organisms,” Arista muttered.

  “No attempt was made to punish or discipline the worker because of his legal action,” Blake said.

  “We made damn sure of that!”

  “In fact, he was given a raise and promoted within a year after losing his suit against his own employers.”

  Dexter’s bushy eyebrows jumped—oh, really?—but he said nothing.

  “I was curious as to where the actual text of the Prime Directive originated,” Blake continued. “I managed to uncover a draft of a memo from Brandt Webster, who as you may know is now Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans…”

  Dexter erupted. “How?”

  “Sir?”

  “How did you discover this draft memo?”

  “I used a, uh, home computer. Webster’s memo spells out the wording of the Prime Directive virtually as it was adopted more than a year later. I’m wondering…”

  As Dexter’s thick brows drew closer together he stumbled over a seagull carcass.

  “…if possibly Webster worked with your people at Vox Populi in drafting the proposal to the Council of Worlds.”

  Dexter’s glance flickered to his sister. “Certainly it’s possible. I’m not sure, at this late date.”

  “Sir, Webster’s superior initially rejected his proposal on several grounds, mainly that in unprecedented situations astronauts should be allowed the greatest possible scope of judgment and action. Further, that there was no evidence of extraterrestrial life in the solar system at the time and plenty of evidence against its existence under any but Earthlike conditions. All that happened five months before the Space Board worker came to you with his complaint.” Blake patted the polycanvas briefcase he had lugged up the beach. “I have the holocopies here.”

  “Mm. Later, Mr. Redfield.”

  “I also have copies of the documents the worker, Mr. Gupta, showed you when he came to you with his complaint. And holos of the recovered Jupiter probe that supposedly brought an infectious organism back to Ganymede Base. And microcphotograms of the supposed alien organism. And the doctor’s report of the worker’s CNS infection…”

  “I remember all those perfectly well,” Dexter said irritably, but the fire had gone out of his objection.

  Arista smiled nastily. “Then Mr. Redfield won’t ha
ve to show you the documents that proved the so-called alien organism was ordinary S. cerevisiae—yeast—mutated, by exposure to gamma radiation and antibiotics.”

  “That didn’t come out until much later,” said Dexter.

  “And his nervous-system infection turned out to be a mild case of herpes,” said Arista.

  “So the defense contended,” said Dexter.

  “So the jury believed,” said Arista.

  “By then we had dominated the media for months,” Dexter said. “The larger issue was well understood by the public—dangerous alien lifeforms could exist. As I said at the time, bugs in the bushes—”

  “Birds,” Arista muttered.

  “—are worth a timely stitch. And I still firmly believe that.”

  “Sir, this Gupta may be a member of the group I mentioned earlier, the Free Spirit…”

  Dexter’s eyebrows shot up. “Ah, I see it now! A conspiracy!” He made a sharp left turn, leading the little group around the outfall from a sewage pipe. “You are implying that I was duped into helping create a political climate in which the Prime Directive would pass over the objections of Space Board higher-ups. Yes, yes, Redfield, now I see why my sister swallowed your sugar-coated argument. But you’ve skipped something.”

  “What would that be?” asked Arista.

  “Motivation!” Objection! “What possible motivation could this Free Spirit cult of yours have for protecting human explorers from extraterrestrial germs!”

  “None, sir.”

  “F. O. B.!” Dexter crowed.

  “Q. E. D.,” muttered Arista.

  “That’s not what the Prime Directive primarily does, sir,” Blake said mildly. “The Prime Directive in effect requires an explorer to sacrifice himself or herself before harming or causing distress to an extraterrestrial.”

  “Even an extraterrestrial bug,” Arista said sourly. “Dexter, shut up a minute. Stop defending yourself and just listen.”